


nor no man either

by silklace



Category: Ancient Greek Religion & Lore, The Song of Achilles - Madeline Miller
Genre: Light Feminization, M/M, POV First Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-30
Updated: 2019-12-30
Packaged: 2021-02-27 12:48:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,696
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22037308
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/silklace/pseuds/silklace
Summary: In the end, he doesn’t take the earrings.
Relationships: Achilles/Patroclus (Song of Achilles), Achilles/Patroclus of Opus (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore)
Comments: 19
Kudos: 205





	nor no man either

**Author's Note:**

> I recently re-read TSoA and the only thing I could think about afterwards was that Achilles wore a dress for six weeks and Patroclus didn't fuck him in it. This is an attempt to remedy that and is a re-telling of sorts of Odysseus and Diomedes' visit to Scyros to find their war weapon, Achilles. It only diverges from canon to make porn happen, really! The quotes in italics at the beginning and end are directly from Madeline Miller's text and are also an attempt to provide some additional context.

_“My husband has come for me, and now I may leave your court. Thank you for your hospitality.” Achilles curtsied. I noted with an idle, dazed part of my mind that he did it remarkably well._

*

_I looked back to Achilles. He was holding the earrings up to his ears now, turning them this way and that, pursing his lips, playing at girlishness. It amused him, and the corner of his mouth curved up. His eyes flicked around the hall, catching for a moment on my face. I could not help myself. I smiled._

“Run with me,” he says, though he is already flecked with sweat and sand and lit up by the sun. His chest heaves. The dress lies puddled next to my hand, nut brown from the long days we spend here next to the sea, away from the castle and the cloistered women’s room and the peering eyes. He discarded it almost immediately – the fabric undone with a simple tie around his shoulders. It slid over his slim hips like water and pooled at his sandelled feet. 

I squint up at him. “Who will keep your time?”

He reaches his hand out, insistent. “The ocean tides. The sea birds.” I let him pull me up and into the circle of his arms. “The sound of our feet hitting the sand,” he continues, laughing a little now, squinting back at me. We’re both smiling at each other, though there are so many reasons not to smile, here on this island with the shadow of his pregnant wife and her unhappy father. “The sound of your heart pulsing in time with mine.”

I roll my eyes. My mouth is a curved thing. “You know I can’t keep pace with you.”

“That’s okay,” Achilles says, already turning towards the line of the sea, pink feet flexing against the hot sand. “I will keep pace with you.”

In the end, he doesn’t take the earrings.

“Your dancers are the finest in the land,” Odysseus says, raising his cup in an honoring gesture towards Lycomedes. The girls wait on their knees, heads tilted towards the floor, for Lycomedes to invite them to the table. He does with a benevolent sweep of his palm. 

Diomedes’ eyes are sharp on the girl with the delicate ankles. I do not think Achilles will dare to sit near me, but then he is rounding the table to take the seat next to mine. 

“Hello, husband,” he murmurs, voice sweet and pitched to softness. My fork clatters against my plate in my clumsiness. Achilles’ smile grows sweeter, like figs ripening under the sun. 

“Chironides,” Odysseus says, voice bright and ringing across the table. “Your wife dances like she is blessed by Terpsichore.”

I reach for my goblet of honeyed wine. Diomedes cuts his dark eyes away from the dancing girl to add in, “Light-footed and nimble.” A furrow forms between Lycomedes’ brows. 

“Your words honor us,” I tell them. Next to me, Achilles nods demurely. 

“It is perhaps a trick of the gods that dancers and warriors alike share such characteristics,” Odysseus continues, cutting a slice of his meat and eating it with the back of his pronged fork. “Clever on their feet, that is.”

Next to me, Achilles has gone very still. “Yes,” I say. 

Odysseus raises his brow like I have said something amusing. “Though of course they are weapons both, in their own right.” His eyes flick back to Diomedes, who is offering the fine-ankled girl a slice of hot, spiced meat from his fingertips. 

Lycomedes clears his throat. Odysseus does not hear or simply does not care. His voice is light, like we are all old friends. “Chironides, you must know well what it is like to be speared on the sharp end of your wife’s weapon,” he says, tearing meat with his teeth. Diomedes makes a noise like a grunt that I think hides laughter somewhere inside of it. Lycomedes’ chin rests on his chest, his eyes fixed on the goblet between his fingers. 

I imagine I can hear Achilles' blood, hot and close to the surface of his skin. He itches to lash at Odysseus with tongue or fist, but both are cosseted by his dress and the covering over his hair. It is not a woman’s place. 

I unstick my tongue. My shoulders make mountains of themselves. “My father taught me that a tool is only a weapon in the hands of someone who would make it so. A knife can tear flesh as much as it may harvest herbs for healing.”

“Your father is a wise man,” Odysseus says, nodding, “son of Chiron.”

Diomedes reaches for his goblet. “You bore me with this prattle. If I wanted to hear you philosophize, I would listen when you speak.” He leans back in his chair. He has the litheness of a cat in his bones. “Why would I do that, when I could do much more pleasurable things. Perhaps we shall have another dance.”

Lycomedes looks up. “You will tire our dancers before they have had a chance to recover,” he objects, but when Diomedes asks again, he does not refuse. He seems to not know how. 

Achilles rises, fixing his skirts, touching the scarf on his head. I watch him as he leaves. His hips sway under his dress. When I look up, Odysseus is watching me. 

The girls dance a second time. Their feet flash over the stone floor like minnows in the shallow pools of an ocean tide. When the music stops, Achilles’ chest is heaving. 

I push my chair back. A serving boy stands nearby. “Have some food taken to my rooms,” I tell him. Diomedes eyes me. He likely thinks my blood is roused. That I will take my wife to my rooms and have her for the rest of the evening. Let him think what he wishes. At least there will be no more talk of warriors in this hall tonight. 

As we leave, I can hear the faint tinkling of Achille’s anklets, like seashells, like birdsong, like the sound armor makes as it drops onto shoulders too small for its weight. 

“I was good, wasn’t I?” Without his face tipped demurely down, I can see the hectic flush on Achilles’ cheeks. The warm light from the hallway torches burnish him in amber. He is like a sunset, lit up and cresting. 

“Is your face painted?” I peer closely at the gold on his eyelids, down the center of his arched lips. 

“All the girls do it,” he says quickly. 

“I see.”

We round the corner. Guards line the hallway. Achilles is a flutter of soft noise next to me – the tinkle of his dancing garb, the swish of his skirts. Some of the guards keep their eyes honest; some of the guards make faces like wolves. 

In my rooms, the serving boy has left a platter of food on a small table near the balcony. It is mounded with strips of salted fish and soft bread; oils spiced with herbs and honeys; a bundle of grapes the color of the underbelly of a whelk; figs dried into hard knots of grainy sweetness. Achilles reaches for a grape. 

“You did not have a chance to eat your meal,” I observe, leaning against the balcony and watching the way his fingers pluck delicately at the round fruit. 

Achilles looks over his shoulder at me, half a grape in his fingertips. He tosses it back towards the platter. “Food is not what my appetite wishes for.”

I am thinking of the sea, and earlier, when his soft lips yielded to mine under the setting of the sun, and I had wanted more. _Later,_ he had promised. 

“You dance very fine,” I tell him. 

His smile is like a crooked, warmed thing. He raises his hands in the air and his wrists tumble over each other. He cocks his hip from one side, and then to the other. A slow, oceanic rhythm. 

I go to him, and he is waiting for it. He tips his head back. His hips cant forward, his shoulders slide backwards to meet the wall, and all the while his wrists stay over his head. He crosses them. The backs of his palms meet stone. 

I kiss him. The ocean makes a sound like an animal, or like the blood in my ears; roaring. I kiss him and kiss him and kiss until our lips are smudged with each other’s kisses, and then I slide my hands into his fine, golden hair and I kiss him some more. 

“Would you like to see the jewelry I chose?” he asks, after my mouth has found the place on his jaw that makes his head tip to one side as if he would allow me to do it forever; to kiss this one, sweet, defining spot for the rest of eternity. 

“I would,” I murmur. 

“You will have to let go of me, then,” he promises, voice blushed with sweetness, “so that I can slip out of my dress.”

I clutch him closer at those words – the gauzy material bunches under my fingers. He laughs and shifts forward to press his arousal against mine. 

“Achilles,” I say, only it is barely a word in my mouth – it is like steam rising from bread. 

He tips his head back. His hips do not stop moving. “Would you like to see what is under my dress?” His breath is hot on my cheek. I want to put my hand on his thigh and crook it around my waist, like we used to do in Chiron’s cave – him moving restlessly under me, knees digging into my flanks. 

Instead I step back and find his mouth at the same time, so that our kiss is the last place our bodies are touching, so that he is arching towards me as if he cannot let go as my fingers fall from his waist. 

“Will you help me with the hem?” His eyes are dancing in the gleaming light of the braziers. 

I drop to my knees. His hips shudder forward, as if reflexively. I smile up at him and his eyes are soft for me. 

I put my hands on his thighs. He isn’t expecting me to touch him there and the noise he makes is an arrow and it shoots through me with desire. I push the fabric up and it reveals first his ankles, then his shins, then the knobs of his knees, pink and sweet. I lean forward and lick one, and then the other. 

“Patroclus,” I hear him say, and each syllable of my name is like a stone he keeps under his tongue. When I look up, his mouth is very red and very wet from where he has been biting his lip. “Hurry,” he breathes. 

I do not need to be told a second time and I rise with the fabric, pulling it over his shoulders and his head and he helps me by which I mean he squirms and gets caught in the neck opening of the dress and when he is free of it he is giggling and his hair is everywhere and there is a very fine, very delicate gold chain hanging from around his neck. It ends in a single, amber-colored stone above his navel. 

“Oh,” I say. The fabric of his dress slips from my fingers and splashes onto the stone floor. 

His hands are back above his head, pressed to the stone wall, crossed at the wrist. “Do you like it?” he asks, twisting a little, smile like an arched thing. 

“Yes,” I tell him. “On you.”

I watch his throat move as he swallows, as he swipes his tongue across the bottom of his lip. “You have,” he says, carefully, “a very pretty wife.” His eyes flick to the door. It is barred. I did it myself and didn’t care that the serving boy likely heard the sound of its heavy stone falling into place as he left. “Don’t you?”

I look at him. His ribs make ladders of his flanks. I have counted each of them with my fingers, and again with my mouth. My gaze is heavy between his legs, where his cock is fat with arousal. Every person in this castle thinks we are back here, coupling. “Pretty,” I tell him, “all over.”

He preens. There is no other word for it. “Come to me, husband,” he whispers. And I do. 

The oil makes slippery beasts of us both. 

“Inside,” Achilles breathes, hushed and raw. He tries to hook his ankle against my back, to usher me forward, and groans in artless frustration when he cannot. 

“I am inside of you,” I tell him, a laugh in the corner of my mouth. I roll my wrist. He clenches around my fingers, and I have to hold the base of my cock with my other hand to stop from spilling. The linen tacks under my knees and against the small of his back. 

“Patroclus,” he admonishes. Even with his legs in the air, his voice has gods rising from it. _Everyone in this castle thinks that I am inside of you_ , I think, again, and lean down to kiss him on his open mouth, on the curve of his throat, on the divine architecture of his collarbones. 

“Bed me,” Achilles says against my mouth, and his voice is still heated but now he is looking at me with those soft eyes again. His fingers run across my cheeks, slide into my hair. “My husband.”

“You like saying it,” I murmur, and push his thighs apart with my hands. My cockhead brushes against him and he groans, voice thrown back against the ceiling. “Calling me your husband.”

“I like saying true things,” he whispers. We are watching each other. I am sinking into him, and he into me. “Like this,” he says, touching my chest with light fingers, “that I will never have another.”

I slide into him another inch. Both of his palms find my chest, like he wants to feel the way my lungs will be full of hot breath when I take him. 

“Like this,” he says, voice as hot as an ember as my cock is swallowed up by him, “that I will always be wed to you first.” His eyes, I realize, are wet. “And only.”

My hips make a song of his spine, arching. “And this,” I say, and kiss his throat. He is always better with his words. I cannot stop kissing him here, where his skin smells like salt and honey. 

“Yes,” he breathes, and I can hear the way he is twisting between laughter and pleasure from my attentions. From my cock and my mouth. “And this,” he thrills. His fingers curl around my jaw and tug me toward his mouth. I slow the fuck of my hips, so that he will feel it, every drag of it, and his smile goes sly and happy. He pushes his hips forward and opens himself up on my cock. 

“And this,” he says, again, pulling away from our kiss with soft reluctance, so sweet and pink it aches. And then I find myself on my back. Achilles crouches over me, wild, mouth like a hook on which I am caught. I show him the soft, fish-white underbelly of my flesh. 

We have come uncoupled in his movements, but now he reaches behind himself and holds me against him. Rubs me against him. 

“Achilles,” I gasp, but he is relentless. His body clenches towards me. I want to be inside of him again. He does not keep me waiting long. 

“This.” He is silent and still. The stone walls are turned gold with our light. I reach for his face and he curls into the touch. 

“Beloved,” I tell him, in his own tongue. His eyes are dark and wide. Pools at night. 

“And this,” he whispers, and then he is not still and he is not silent, not for a long time. 

He will not go back to the women’s room, not tonight. 

Tonight, I will feed him grapes and figs from my fingertips and try to shake off the feeling of dawn approaching like a shadow come to steal him away from me. 

“We should sleep,” I say, though I do not really mean it. 

“We will,” Achilles says. Neither of us move. He crosses his ankles on the wall, and I can see a lick of his pink heels from where my cheek rests on his belly. 

His head is tipped nearly off the edge of the bed. “Mead or wine?”

“Mead. Easy. Wine tastes like dirt.”

Achilles sucks his teeth. “Heathen. Does not. You liked Chiron’s stash of wines,” he points out. 

“Sweet. I like things that are sweet.” His fingers curl into my hair. 

“Alright. Figs or apricots?”

“That’s easy.” I press my lips against his belly. “Always figs.”

“Mm,” he says. “Here.” I lift my head and catch the grape he tosses in my mouth. “Good one.” His voice is appreciative. “That was your first catch.” In anyone else’s mouth, it’d be teasing, but in his, it isn’t. 

“I think my elbow smashed one into the linens earlier,” I tell him, tickling at the soft, golden hairs on his belly with my nose. His foot twitches against the wall. 

“Stop or you will have me ready to go again,” he pleads, voice laughing. As if it isn’t half my intention. “Moon or sun?”

“Achilles,” I say, looking up at him. “You already know all of my answers.”

“So?” He shrugs as if my observation is entirely beside the point. “Slide down a bit? My head is blood-dizzy.”

I lift up and make room for him. He curls into the space near me, chin on my chest. “Moon or sun?” His voice is conspiratorial. His eyes are dancing. 

“Achilles,” I say. “Sun.” The words mean the same thing. 

He kisses me. His lips are softness. “Kiss?” he says and demonstrates the word again. “Or touch?” His fingers curl. 

“Oh,” I breathe. Now I am arching under him. “Do not make me choose.”

“Tongue,” his pink tongue dashes my chest, “or cock?” He clambers astride me. I do not have a word for the way we feel against each other, softened and sated and roused all over again. 

“You tell me,” I say, meeting his thrusts, touching him on the place where his arched hips round into softness. 

“That is not the game,” he protests, voice like wet silk. He hesitates, barely noticeable to anyone else but me, but I see it in the flicker of his lashes, in the minutest twist of his mouth, and then he is saying, “Husband.”

“Beloved,” I murmur into the hot air between us. “I want you.”

“Eromenos?” He asks, brow arched, thrusting his cock along the cut of my hip. “Or,” he breathes, “erastes?” and he nudges forward and backward until my cock brushes the swell of his arse. 

“Both,” I say, mindless, wanting. Tomorrow I think he will have little fingerprint-shaped marks on his hips. I press harder. “Either.”

He wings down to kiss me. His eye-teeth wink at me. “I will not make you choose,” he says, sinking onto me. His face softens as he takes me inside of him. “Not now or ever,” he promises. 

Morning comes, though we race against Eos’ light feet. The sun is very bright, and it catches on the ends of Achilles’ hair as he gathers it back to cover again with his scarf. 

We are called to morning meal. In the hallway, I stop Achilles with a hand on his arm and say, “We do not have to go.”

But we do go. We go, and Diomedes and Odysseus look at us with speculative eyes. We go, and we eat warm spiced bread with honey and nuts and goat’s milk with herbs. We go, and Lycomedes asks how long Diomedes and Odysseus will be honoring us with their stay. 

We go, and Odysseus says, “That depends.”

We go, and the battle horn trills three times, and the women cry out, and Lycomedes touches his chest in horror. 

We go, and Achilles has vaulted the table, commandeered a guard’s spear, and placed himself in front of me before the horn sounds its last bleating call. Before anyone else has managed to curl their fingers around their knife hilts. 

We go, and Achilles’ scarf falls away from his hair as he leaps, a godling taken to flight, over the table to stand in front of me. 

Odysseus smiles at Lycomedes. “I do not think we will trouble your hospitality for much longer, my friend.”

Odysseus offers a choice. A short life and glory. A long life, hidden in the shadows, name turned to dust. It is not a choice. 

In my rooms, packing our few belongings, I go to him. I touch his chin. I have not noticed, but now I do, how it has begun to widen into the sturdy shape of a man’s jaw.

“Patroclus,” he says. The question is in his eyes. I do not want it to make it to his lips. So I stop it with my mouth. “Patroclus,” he says, softer, later. 

“I will not make you choose,” I tell him. “Not now or ever.”

Instead, I will choose. Again and again and again. This and this and this. Him. I will choose him, until the gods have asked me for the last time. 

*

_Before the final blast was finished, Achilles had swept up one of the silvered swords and flung off its kidskin sheath. The table blocked his path to the door; he leapt it in a blur, his other hand grabbing a spear from it as he passed. He landed, and the weapons were already lifted, held with a deadly poise that was like no girl, nor no man either. The greatest warrior of his generation._

_I yanked my gaze to Odysseus and Diomedes and was horrified to see them smiling. “Greetings, Prince Achilles,” Odysseus said. “We’ve been looking for you.”_

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you very much for reading! I adore and treasure your comments and thoughts! <3


End file.
